QoS and Handover-Aware Resource Allocation for Flexible Gateway Diversity

The paper relates to flexible gateway diversity and dynamic resource allocation for high throughput multi-spot beam satellite systems, including a plurality of cooperative gateways; a software-defined networking (SDN) terrestrial infrastructure connecting through a plurality of SDN switches; a SDN controller in charge of dynamically setting up different routing paths for different traffic priority classes through flexible gateways and sending the forwarding rules to the SDN switches; and a cluster of autonomous gateway agents endowed with situational awareness measurements, predictive traffic estimates and resource allocation techniques. In clear sky conditions, the design and implementation of an adaptive architecture with a feedback control loop judiciously allocates gateway resources shared by the said queues such that the network-side discontent; e.g., unmet throughput per traffic class, is minimized. In contrast with ad-hoc approaches that often rely on laborious tuning and design iterations, the use of coordination and control supported by local gateway agents is further investigated to systematically design feedback-based gateway switching mechanisms with proven performance guarantees when subject to degradation of one or more feeder links in potential outage events. Properties of the gateway switching as proposed herein include robust relative handover guarantees and resource utilization efficiency.